POLES VOTING AGAINST HEROES OF SOLIDARITY

In what one winner called a "historic result," Poland's voters rejected strict capitalist reforms Sunday and swung their support to two post-Communist parties.

If exit poll results stand, the vote is a crushing blow to Poland's Solidarity movement heroes, who led their country-and the entire Eastern bloc-away from the old Communist regimes.

Dismayed reformers fear the parliamentary election results will send a signal to the rest of Eastern Europe and to Russia to abandon thoughts of free-market reform.

The reformers also worry that former Communists will steer Poland back to the old days, when free enterprise was stifled along with personal freedom.

But reformed Communist leaders moved quickly to assure the world that Poland wouldn't revert to the past.

"We have a feeling of great responsibility," said Aleksander Kwasniewski, leader of the Democratic Left Alliance, the party of reformed Communists. "This is a very important step in strengthening democracy in Poland.

"We are facing a test of democracy."

Although his alliance grew out of the old Communist party, Kwasniewski calls himself a "social democrat," and he voted for mass privatization. Kwasniewski is widely respected as an advocate of the new free market. But many of his party's members spent years as Communists.

After casting a ballot in his hometown of Gdansk, President Lech Walesa said he would nominate the Alliance's candidate for prime minister if final tallies later this week confirm the victory.

Voter turnout was estimated at 48 percent. Many Polish residents of the United States also participated in the election. Early results released Sunday were unofficial, and the final count is expected later this week.

"Democracy is not a joke," Walesa said Sunday. "If the nation wants it, then it has to be."

But the choice was deeply disillusioning to Walesa and other former Solidarity leaders.

Solidarity's victory over communism was hailed around the world in 1989, but the glory was short-lived. Inefficient state factories went bankrupt when faced with foreign competition. And a sinister new phenonemon-poverty-swept Poland.

"Poland was perceived as a country pulling this entire part of Europe forward," said Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka, whose post-Solidarity reform party, the Democratic Union, came in third.

"I'm hoping the next government will continue this path."

Suchocka acknowledged that reforms suffered because while much of the country grew poorer, some "were getting richer-and this was perceived as injustice."

Aleksander Luczak, leader of the Polish Peasant Party, former allies of the Communist regime, said that voters "didn't accept the radical and heavy reforms" toward capitalism.

"It's a historic result . . . society has spoken," he said. His party ran second, behind the Alliance.

Despite assurances from reformers that Poland's transition was working, voters had doubts.

"I have my convictions because I think you should always defend poor people. Not only poor people, but those who can't help themselves-old people and handicapped people. We have millions of pensioners, like an army, who are living on the edge of poverty and lots of my friends have lost their jobs," said Maria Olczak, 60, a retired economist who voted for Kwasniewski's Alliance.

"Mr. Kwasniewski thinks a free market is needed, but it shouldn't destroy our home industry. . . . This is the left wing of the future-it's not the Communist system anymore," Olczak said.

The early count indicated the Alliance, (known by the Polish initials SLD), will have the largest block in Parliament with 18 percent of the vote. The peasant party (PSL) had 14 percent.

Since most parties didn't get the 5 percent required to gain seats in Parliament, the two front-runners will end up with a higher percentage of seats than votes. If predictions hold, the SLD will have 29 percent of seats in the Sejm, Parliament's powerful lower house, and the PSL will have 23.

That would give them a combined majority of 52 percent. The reform-oriented Democratic Union received an estimated 12 percent of the vote and would have 16 percent of the seats.

Although Warsaw has new businesses, unemployment has risen from virtually zero before 1989 to more than 15 percent.

State-run steel mills, coal mines and even the famous Gdansk shipyards face staggering losses. Farmers, too, can no longer make ends meet as their antiquated methods come up against the modern farms of the West.

Yet practically no one, even those who voted for the SLD and PSL, seems to want to return to hard-line Communist rule.

". . . This young generation wants an improvement-they're educated, with common sense. I'd rather trust them than the Christian party leaders or those other lunatics," said Magdalena Kowara, 22, a Warsaw University student who voted for the SLD.

The Christian parties-which tumbled in popularity after pushing through a strict anti-abortion law-were on the verge of making it into Parliament. Since they joined in a coalition, those parties need 8 percent of the vote to gain seats, and exit polls showed them with 7 percent.

The once esteemed Liberal Democratic Congress, a staunch free-market group that drew scorn after unemployment grew, were at just 5 percent. It seemed that only final tallies would determine whether they, the Christians or several other smaller parties would make it to Parliament.

The Union of Labor, a leftist post-Solidarity group, appeared to be in at 7 percent.

The elections were held ahead of schedule because Walesa dissolved Parliament in May and called new elections after the Sejm voted to oust Suchocka.